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Soon, your soy milk may not be called 'milk'
Soy and almond drinks that bill themselves as "milk" may need to consider alternative language after a top regulator suggested the agency may start cracking down on use of the term.
The Food and Drug Administration signaled plans to start enforcing a federal standard that defines "milk" as coming from the "milking of one or more healthy cows." That would be a change for the agency, which has not aggressively gone after the proliferation of plant-based drinks labeled as "milk."
FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb talked about the plans this week, noting there are hundreds of federal "standards of identity" spelling out how foods with various names need to be manufactured.
"The question becomes, have we been enforcing our own standard of identity," Gottlieb said about "milk" at the Politico event Tuesday. "The answer is probably not."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Saturday July 21 2018, @05:34PM
If we don't want the slide in quality and evasion of regulation you're talking about, then we have to engineer things differently in our society.
In the past people have campaigned successfully for better labeling to combat the erosion of quality. To combat fake sugar water being passed off as juice flavored with a little citric acid, they insisted on labels that specified what percentage of the volume was fruit juice. So the companies said 'no problem' and started labeling their juice as 'orange, with 100% real juice!' when the juice was 100% white grapes (the cheapest fruit to juice) and a little pulp and citric acid were added to make it taste like orange.
Pink slime, which you cited, was used to claim 100% all-beef patties, though none of us looking at a vat of pink slime would ever have called it that.
The profit motive drives that race to the bottom. Essentially, it gives producers every reason to cheat. That in turn gives producers added incentive to recruit government as an accessory to the cheating. Average Joe, working three jobs to pay the mortgage, student loans, medical insurance, taxes, taxes, taxes, sales taxes, and utilities that seem to grow more expensive by double digits every year, does not have the time and certainly does not have the energy to keep an eye on government to make sure they're not stabbing him in the back. Thus a very few win big, and everyone else loses and loses and loses.
One answer is DIY. Don't trust food companies and the government? Then grow/raise your own food. But Average Joe might not have any time left to do that, and Average Sue, living in a studio apartment in Manhattan, can't exactly plant the back 40 to grow the soy beans she wants to eat. Then again, maybe Sue can get part of the way there by using a CSA and green markets.
Those remain edge cases, though, and something bigger has to change about why we do what we do.
Washington DC delenda est.